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by vix_spes



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 12:03:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vix_spes/pseuds/vix_spes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John comes to some conclusions when he’s away from Baker Street for a few days.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> Written for [thedragonsinger](http://thedragonsinger.livejournal.com)

  
  
John finds it quite amusing that it’s taken him this long for homesickness to finally strike and of all the trips that he’s been on, all of the tours of duty, it’s on a four day medical conference in Paris that the affliction strikes. Four days at a conference on developments in emergency trauma medicine. Four days with peace and quiet, no strange smells coming from the kitchen (probably because there’s no kitchen), a fridge full of extortionately priced mini bottles of alcohol instead of various biohazards, no violin music in the early hours of the morning and no sounds of bullets being fired from the weapon that he definitely didn’t own. Four days without random (incredibly random) displays of affections or what his lover determined to be affection, four days without sex and four days without his very own cuddly human octopus. He had never thought he would miss Sherlock so much.  
  
He was never one of those people who had pined for home when he had first started university and even when he had joined the army. He had missed his parents, he had even missed Harry, when he first moved to London but he had simply accepted that missing them was a fact of life and he couldn’t mope away in his bedroom for the rest of his life. He had better things to do and it was a waste of everything he had worked so hard for. So he threw himself into lectures, study groups, the rugby club down at Blackheath and of course the obligatory partying.  
  
Then the army had come along. It had always been in the background but it finally became a reality. Afghanistan hadn’t been his first tour of duty, regardless of what some people thought. He had actually been on his third tour of duty in the Afghan conflict when he had been invalided home and Afghanistan had followed tours of duty in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and even a brief tour in Iraq. Some of the lads that he’d served with on that third tour, some of those lads that he’d found himself covered in their blood and desperately trying to save their limbs and often their lives in that damned sand, were so green to combat, barely out of training. They had pined for home, desperately waiting for care packages to come through with news of their loved ones. By that point, John didn’t care. His dad had died before John had qualified and his mum had died just before he shipped out to Kosovo. There was only Harry and she was too wrapped up in Clara to care about him. By the time he was invalided home, she was too wrapped up in the divorce and whatever lay at the bottom of a bottle to care.  
  
Then again, he supposed that he’d never really had a home. Not since he had left his parent’s house, the place where he had grown up, to go to university. He had lived in plenty of houses, flats, barracks whatever and they had, in the most part, been perfectly nice. They had fulfilled their purpose and provided accommodation but none of them had been a home. When he had been invalided home, discharged from hospital and living in that fairly shitty bedsit he had lost the hope that one day he would have a home.  
  
That had all changed when Mike Stamford had called out to him in that little park. And he couldn't have been more grateful. Within the space of about twenty-four hours, probably less than that if he was honest, he had been kidnapped, shot a serial killer and moved from his shitty bedsit into the lair of a madman. He was the first person to admit that he wasn’t the easiest person to live with when you took into account the PTSD, the nightmares and he had his own set of fairly quirky habits (there were a lot less of them than there had been when he was a student), but his habits were nothing when compared to his new flatmates. There were the experiments, the body parts in the fridge, freezer and occasionally the bathroom, the sleepless nights with both of them running around London chasing god knows who or what, the damned violin, there was never any milk when he wanted a cup of tea, there was rarely any food in the fridge full stop, endless texts of varying importance and Sherlock worried him sick when he refused to eat and sleep during cases. That was without taking into consideration the fact that his eccentric flatmate had an older brother that was either so controlling or so over-protective that he kidnapped potential flatmates and manipulated CCTV cameras. Just when he’d thought that he was getting used to things, he’d been kidnapped by yet another madman, strapped into a vest of semtex before both he and Sherlock were blown up. From there, there had been another shift in their relationship; that of flatmates to that of lovers and a whole new set of quirky habits to get used to. For a start he had had to get used to sleeping in a room where the walls were covered with pictures of criminals. It had taken them time to work out how their newly-faceted (more than slightly) dysfunctional relationship worked but work it did. He was frustrated from time to time but he was able to ignore it and move on every single time (with a few storm outs here and then).  
  
Because this was his home now. It had taken him this long to realise that, for him at least, home wasn’t a place where he lived filled with material items that simply belonged to him. For one Dr. John H. Watson, home was a person, one specific person in fact. The self-proclaimed high-functioning sociopath who had staked his claim in John’s heart with a wink and the words “The name’s Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221b Baker Street.”


End file.
